It's a mainboard, which we cannot help calling a product for those who stick to moderateness in innovations: progressive new chipset (and obligatory PCI-E x16 slot instead of AGP) is combined with three regular 32-bit PCI slots (there are only two PCI-E x1 slots), "fashionable" DDR2 is compensated by three Parallel ATA connectors. In short, it's for those who "have something to lose", unlike the proletariat: you'll find slots for old PCI-cards and connectors for old-fashioned hard disks. All the more you will hardly want to move your old network card to the new system: on-board Gigabit Ethernet, after all :). However, a good external audio card will hardly be replaced for the up-to-date HD Audio by all users in our case – see the results of testing the integrated audio below.

The PCB layout is standard – IDE RAID connectors are in the back, audio ins are in front of the PCI slots, density of the memory slots will hamper access to them. Access to the jumper may be hampered when the mainboard is in a case, its description is provided on the PCB. The 3-phase switching voltage regulator of the processor incorporates two 3300 uF capacitors, seven 1800 uF capacitors, and several ones of a lesser capacity. The PCB also contains voltage regulators for the PCI-E x16 bus (2x1000 uF) and for memory (6x1000 uF). The PCB layout provides a seat for a network controller chip, which is left empty.

A series of Microstar mainboards based on this (or at least on the similar) PCB design is very large. We have compiled all the models into one table for convenience, so that it's easier to see their differences:

You can see that Neo2-FR and Neo2 Platinum do not differ at all. Indeed, we found no differences, at least in the functionality of the mainboards. One can assume that the differences are in another plane – for example in their bundles...

Note that it's already the second mainboard
from MSI we reviewed, which uses this CMedia codec and which received
the "Good" mark for the audio quality instead of usual "Very
good" and "Excellent". It's in spite of the support
for the newest standard of the on-board audio...